Productivity and growth at your fingertips!

Productivity and growth at your fingertips!

Google tools for business productivity and growth

Although our core business may be teaching students how to drive, we are in fact “marketeers” as well! Without marketing, we can be the best Driving Instructor in the “hood” but our business may be slow to grow. Attracting new students and parents to book more driving lessons is essential in order to survive! Competition is rife. In essence, it starts with an excellent customer experience for our students and parents as well as providing them with value-add information.

How do we find time to be more productive and free up some of our time to put into marketing? Some of us may have back office support behind us to attract new business on our behalf, but if you are a solo driving instructor or small driving school, it really is down to us. Start seeing yourself as “small business entrepreneurs”. It will amaze you how this changes one’s mindset and opens up new opportunities to a new way of doing things!

There are a bunch of different ways to boost your business. Sometimes it can be overwhelming with different tools and apps out there. Let’s start with Google and what it has to offer. Naturally, we all want to see our website ranked on page 1, but Google is not simply a search engine. The good news is “Google” provides us as individuals and as business owners with a number of great FREE tools to use.

Check them out – you may not find all of them useful, but certainly one or two of them will come in handy:

How do you stay in touch with your customers? You may or may not currently use Gmail, but is a great email provider for businesses simply due to all the built-in functionality that you get with using it. Gmail is definitely worth considering if you currently use a different email provider.

If Gmail is your thing – a Gmail inbox can become overwhelming and be distracting with spam emails, alerts and information overload. To keep your email organised, you need to look at it as a marketing tool as opposed to a basic account.

The FREE Google Photos app can be downloaded from Itunes and Google Play to store and organise your photos on mobile devices. Google Photos acts as a back up for unlimited photos and videos and these can be accessed from any device. See more on how Google Photos work with Google Drive.

To access Google Photos from your desktop, simply log into your Gmail account, then open photos.google.com and access the Photos icon form the drop down on the top right-hand side.

As a local Driving Instructor or small local Driving School, Google My Business is something you shouldn’t overlook as it is geared towards helping potential customers find you locally. Essentially it is a free listing but also allows you to add a lot of business information allowing people in your local area to learn about your business and the services that you offer. Additionally, it is a great place to build a stronger brand and reputation by building your reviews as an instructor or school. It’s important to fill in as much detailed business information as possible. Once verified, make sure your Google My Business Listing is complete and up-to-date or you could lose potential customers. Your listing can help convince potential students and parents to book lessons with you as a listing generates trust that you are a reputable business.

In our opinion, Google My Business is by far the most important Google+ feature, especially if your business has a local presence. Your listing will increase your visibility in local and mobile search and allows customers to check out your verified business website.

Writing blogs for your Driving School can be time-consuming but your students and parents will appreciate value-add information and a great way to generate fresh ideas for blog and social media posts is by using Google Trends to get creative. Explore trending “stories” or select topics of your choice and those that may be of interest to your students and parents. See what’s trending in the learner driver space.

Google+ is a powerful tool allowing you to connect and share content of interest. It is good to have a presence on Google+ as a Driving Instructor or school as this can help grow your contacts and discover new and interesting content. Take time to post regular posts to your Google+ page (you can use the same content as your Facebook posts) – it is good to be active in this space!

This is just a smidgen of the tools that Google offers – from staying connected, staying organised, working smarter through to growing your business – Google has something for everyone!

A good place to start to increase your productivity as a Driving Instructor or Driving School is to automate the mundane tasks in your business, providing your students and parents with an excellent modern customer experience. Secondly, look at activating your FREE profile page with YLOODrive and increase your ranking in your local area over time. Profile pages are SEO-friendly and designed with Google in mind, to help grow your business and attract more bookings.